Salty Chefs’ Memoirs Recall Grand Larceny, Tongue Cancer: Books

In Gabrielle Hamilton’s
defense, she’s as hard on herself as she is on everybody
else. The chef-owner of New York’s much-loved restaurant
Prune wields a pen that cuts like a knife.

Her vinegary memoir, “Blood, Bones and Butter,” starts
with her unseemly girlhood in eastern Pennsylvania. By the
time she was 13 she was shoplifting, robbing the neighbors’
houses and getting into coke. At 16 she moved to New York
and went to work at the Lone Star Café, a Greenwich Village
bar.

The other waitresses taught her how to steal
efficiently. She avoided doing time for grand larceny only
when her lawyer informed her employers that their cocktail
waitress was in fact a teenager. A few aimless semesters of
college followed.

And then she drifted into years of jobs in giant
catering kitchens, working among “truly mediocre cooks” who
would typically serve “a sit-down dinner for 300” that “had
sat in the warehouse kitchen refrigerator, some components
of it for days.” She hated the pretentiousness and the
dishonesty of the food. Eventually she enrolled in a
university writing program and found it just as phony.

One day she was parking her car in the East Village
when a neighbor pointed out a leasable restaurant space. “I
had nothing, in the traditional sense,” she remembers, “to
qualify me as a chef or a business owner.”

No Foam

What she did have was a lot of cooking experience,
memories of food she had loved growing up and on trips to
France and Greece, and a firm vision: “There would be no
foam and no ‘conceptual’ or ‘intellectual’ food; just the
salty, sweet, starchy, brothy, crispy things that one
craves when one is actually hungry.”

This isn’t material for a novel, but it makes for a
delectable memoir, mainly because Hamilton is such a fine
writer. Consider this description of a reunion with her
mother, after 20 years of not speaking:

“My mother ... is outside our room in the lily beds
peering in through the lace curtains to see if we have
stirred, she herself having been awake, and rubbing her six
hairy legs together with hungry impatience, for hours.”

“Blood, Bones and Butter” demonstrates once again what
a curse it is to have a writer in the family. The
estrangement from her mother is never really explained. The
estrangement from her husband (or ex, I would guess), takes
up the last third of the book.

Gabrielle Hamilton’s acidity fascinated me. It also
made me squirm. It isn’t nice. Then again, if I wanted to
publicly mortify her, I couldn’t find a better way than by
calling her nice. Smart, capable, forceful, yes. Nice, no.
She is a piece of work and proud of it.

Grant Achatz

“Life, on the Line” (I can’t explain that comma), by
Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas, is the memoir of a Chicago
chef who prepares the kind of avant-garde food that
Hamilton loathes. She might be willing to cut him some
slack, though, since he does it better than just about
anybody else. He opened Alinea in 2005, when he was barely
30. The following year Gourmet magazine named it the
country’s best restaurant.

Achatz’s life really is the stuff of a novel -- a grim
one. In 2007 he was diagnosed with late-stage cancer of the
tongue, and the leading oncologists he consulted advised
him he had to have his tongue cut out immediately. He chose
not to.

This drama, unfortunately, doesn’t unfold till the
final quarter of a long book. The preceding pages chronicle
the chef’s remarkably direct, if not remarkably exciting,
advance to the top.

He has handed over something like a third of the
writing to his business partner, Nick Kokonas (these
passages appear in a different typeface), a decision that
is part friendship and part insanity. When I got to the
investor updates covering such subjects as the projected
chair designs for Alinea, I began longing -- crassly, I
know -- to get to the cancer.

“Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education
of a Reluctant Chef” is published by Random House (291
pages, $26). “Life, on the Line: A Chef’s Story of Chasing
Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat” is
published by Gotham (390 pages, $27.50). To buy these books
in North America, click here and here.

Craig Seligman is a critic for Muse, the arts and
leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed
are his own.)